


What Is Essential

by eve11



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alien Planet, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-20
Updated: 2012-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-31 12:35:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/344123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eve11/pseuds/eve11
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rory has to put his trauma skills to use when he and the Doctor are trapped on the front lines of a planetary conflict.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Is Essential

**Author's Note:**

> No depictions of violence per se but does contain some blood, graphic descriptions of injury, and hints of PTSD-like symptoms.

**

It all happened so fast. One second, Rory was fleeing side by side with the Doctor, whose iron grip on his wrist was propelling him bodily through the rubble of New Semarang with a strength he would never have guessed lay in that gangly frame. One second, Rory's attention was completely focused on the bright red splash of Amy's sweater ahead, watching her reach the safety of the dropships with the last group of rebels at the other end of the large open square he and the Doctor had yet to cross. Panting for breath, his vision tunneled and tense, he hardly noticed the thrum of the walker tanks in the alleys behind them or the buzz of projectiles in the air.

"Come on!" the Doctor yelled.

One second, Rory thought, _the Company came through, like the Doctor said they would_. One second, he lurched ahead as the Doctor sped up and jerked him forward, just a hint of a profile and the broad back of his green greatcoat in view. 

The next second, he was on the ground in a scrape of limbs and concrete, dust choking his lungs. His head slammed against something hard and his ears rang. There was noise and pain and he was fighting for ground with something that felt like a cornered alley cat. He couldn't find which way was up. He couldn't catch his breath.

The screech of the dropships breaking Bahasa's atmosphere died out, and Rory's eyes found the sky. He reached out a hand and saw it spattered with blood. He realized the thing he was fighting with was the Doctor, who was writhing and screaming pure agony underneath him. 

"Doctor--" Rory untangled himself and rolled away, the movement wresting another hoarse scream from the man underneath him. When Rory finally sat up, the Doctor was curled away from him in a ball, his hands clawing at his head. His whole body was shaking and his fingertips were wet and bright with blood. Rory tried to roll him over and see where the blood was coming from but he just growled in pain and lashed out with a blind hand. 

"Grrah! Out, out, out, get it out, get it _out_!" The words trailed off into another scream. His hand flailed, hitting the ground again, and he tried to rise up to his elbows. Rory still couldn't see his face or where the blood was coming from, but there was no time to be gentle. A low rumble filled the air; the walker tanks were nearly at the square. He got his feet underneath him, jammed his hands under the Doctor's armpits and interlocked his grip, palm to wrist, over the Doctor's breastbone. The Doctor just panted two panicked breaths and tried to kick away.

"Sorry!" he warned at the Doctor's ear, and then heaved them both away from the open ground, toward the shelter of a blown-out doorway. The Doctor screamed in pain, his feet finally finding purchase as they reached the relative safety of the building. They made it into the bare room and Rory's grip failed; the Doctor crashed shoulder first against the wall and groaned, his whole body curling up again in the corner, his head bowed. Rory kicked the dull blue door closed--one hinge holding it across the entryway--and then quickly went to the Doctor's side. 

"It hurts, oh God, it _hurts_!" Blood was matted through his hair, dripping down his chin. His nose was swollen and scraped and his right eye--the only one Rory could see--was squeezed shut. He was panting for breath, completely disoriented.

"Doctor! Doctor, it's me. I need you to sit back; I need to see the damage." Rory's hands fluttered across the Doctor's frame, trying to corral his hands and keep them from clawing at his face. 

"Please," the Doctor whimpered, his fingers curling and scraping against the concrete where Rory held them. "Rory, you have to"--he turned, reeling and suppressed another groan, gritting his teeth--"get it out!" 

In the dim light, Rory was finally able to settle the other man's back against the wall, and get a look at his face. 

At what was left of his face. 

"Oh my god," Rory gasped. 

He'd been hit with some kind of metal bolt--maybe two inches long and a half-inch wide--that had shattered his left cheek and orbital bones, and lodged itself crookedly across his eye socket up into the bridge of his nose. The end of the bolt that wasn't lodged in the Doctor's face was steadily blinking green. Blood was everywhere.

"Take it out," the Doctor sighed, trying not to sob. "Throw it away, it's a tracer--" 

There was too much tissue damage and swelling for Rory to tell how much, if any, of the Doctor's left eye was still intact. But he could see some ugly-looking flanges in the end of the projectile that looked like they had splayed out into soft tissue and bone. The left side of his face was shredded, and the right side was rapidly bruising; Rory doubted the Doctor would be able to see much out of his right eye if he were to open it.

"Take it out!" the Doctor cried again.

"I can't," Rory said, trying to keep his voice calm and shrugging out of his jacket and flannel shirt, leaving only his white tee on in the chill. "I can't remove it without causing more damage." 

"What's a little more damage now!" the Doctor spat at him, before letting his head thunk back against the wall with a hiss of pain. "The Chethans are looking for conscripts and hostages. It's telling them right where we are!"

He reached for the side of his face again and Rory had to sit across his legs and hold his hands down. "It can't come out!" he pleaded. 

"No time for arguing!" the Doctor shouted. "You won't hurt me, I'll dial down my pain receptors, I'll go into a trance, please, you can't let them find you--" 

"Doctor," Rory placated, still holding the other man's wrists. "Doctor, please, I know it hurts, but you have to calm down. I can't remove it, not here, not right now. Please!"

The Doctor gritted his teeth and groaned, but Rory felt some of the combativeness leach out of his body. His hands were trembling and Rory wondered how Time Lord physiology dealt with shock. "S--sonic," he said through hissed breaths, trying to reach for his coat pocket. "Dis . . . disable it."

Rory guided his hand to his pocket and the Doctor fumbled for the sonic screwdriver, then thrust it into Rory's hands. "Two-five-eight-dash-checkerboard," he panted. "Point and think."

Rory clicked the screwdriver into the right setting, then pointed it at the end of the metal bolt and thought, _Please shut down, please shut down, please shut down_. He pressed the button. The screwdriver buzzed to life, and the Doctor bit back another cry and tried to bat the device away from his face out of pure reflex. He turned his head, nearly slamming his ruined cheek into the wall.

"Hold still!" Rory hissed. 

The Doctor seized Rory's bare forearm hard enough to bruise, but he stilled. The green light in the bolt kept blinking. 

"It's not turning off!" Rory said. "Doctor . . ."

Then, the blink skipped a beat. The Doctor was shuddering in pain beneath him, sweating, his whole body tense with a silent scream. Rory held his breath and counted to three in his head. Nothing; the light was dead. 

"Okay," Rory said, letting go of the button. His muscles suddenly felt like rubber bands and jelly. "Now, it's turned off."

The Doctor let out a sound that may have been a laugh or a cry. He let go of Rory's arm, smearing blood across the pale skin. His right eye opened to a slit and he blinked dully in the dim room.

"Rory Williams," he said thickly. "Get off my lap."

**

The building they were in was little more than a husk. Dirt floor, no glass in the crumbling windows. There was nothing Rory could use to sterilize the wound or even to wash away the dirt and blood from the site. All he could do was stabilize the bolt as best he could with the strips of his flannel shirtsleeves that, by virtue of being covered by his jacket, had been spared most of the dust and grime from the streets of New Semarang. He cushioned the bolt against any further movement, and then wrapped the rest of his shirt around the Doctor's head to keep everything still and staunch the bleeding as best he could.

The Doctor fell in and out of consciousness while Rory dressed the wound. "Might pass out," he'd slurred in warning about thirty seconds before doing exactly that. "Healing trance. Perfectly natural." He fought weakly against Rory's hands at first, but soon drifted too far away to notice the pain. Occasionally, he inhaled sharply or shuddered a sigh or a murmured word that Rory didn't understand. Some sounded like a foreign language. Some phrases were peppered with recognizable names. Sarah Jane. Donna. Susan. Rory just held his hand and tried to make him comfortable for the wait.

Because they were definitely going to have to wait. Even if he could trust the Doctor to walk, the area was crawling with Chethan tanks. The TARDIS was still back at the rebel stronghold that had been overrun by the encroaching army. The dropships had all fled. 

Night fell. 

"Amy." The Doctor gasped and gripped Rory's fingers. Rory looked up through the window to the clear sky, trying to pick out the strands of the Batu Murni Mining Company's satellite city web, twinkling two hundred miles above them.

"She's safe," he said. 

The Doctor sighed and slept.

**

It took a day for the tanks to pass by, and another night before the Doctor fully regained consciousness. Rory awoke to cold, gray dawn, and the Doctor sitting underneath the window and scrutinizing him through the slit of his good eye. 

"Good news and bad news," he whispered. His skin, where it wasn't covered by the bandage, was clammy with sweat. He looked feverish.

"You're awake," Rory said. "You can see me?"

The Doctor smiled. "That's the good news," he whispered. 

"Why are you whispering?" Rory whispered back.

"That's the bad news," the Doctor whispered, and indicated the window. Rory chanced a glance outside to see platoons of Chethan shock troops scouring the square in neat rows. It was only a matter of time before the patrols encountered their hiding place.

Rory looked at the Doctor. He was likely battling an infection at the wound site; it was only going to sap his strength the longer they stayed here. 

He swallowed. "What do we do?" 

The Doctor inched away from the window and struggled to his feet, leaning heavily against the wall and using the corner to keep himself balanced. 

"Run for it," he said. 

Then the door flew open and six shock troops in full battle armor stormed in. The Doctor started and swayed against the wall, his knees buckling. Rory scrabbled the rest of the way to his feet, trying to put himself between his injured companion and the approaching slavers, but they both ended up on their knees when the Doctor couldn't stay upright and Rory couldn't keep him from falling.

The Doctor smiled wanly, and did what he did best. 

"Hello!" he said brightly as three of the slavers advanced into the room, training their micro-stunners on the the pair of them. "Well I don't suppose you'd like to pass on by here, as I doubt we'd be very useful conscripts; your tracer's done a number on my depth perception and my companion here is rubbish at digging, absolutely useless, the pair of us, and pardon me for saying so, but I love your boots--"

Rory stopped and stared at the trooper on the far right, who had hung back in the doorway. He knew those boots. He knew--

The trooper discreetly toed the door closed.

"Now!" she called in a distinctly Scottish lilt, and the three in the back turned their micro-stunners on their surprised compatriots--though, not before a stray blast from one of the front three dealt Rory a glancing blow that sent him reeling backward. Electric energy hit him like a freight train. He moaned and collapsed on the floor, his head swimming, his vision fading.

"You are _not_ allowed to botch this rescue by passing out now!"

The trooper hovered over him, calling something else that his ears couldn't make sense of. She took off her helmet, her bright red hair cascading down around him, concern and relief wrought across her face. He held out a hand to her, and passed out.

When he woke again they were on a dropship, accelerating impossibly fast up into the sky.

**

The satellite city web had state of the art facilities for the Gamma sector in 2217, but the Batu Murni physicians weren't prepared to treat Time Lord physiology. The Doctor was in surgery for half a day to remove the bolt and bond his tissue and vascular systems, but his body merely absorbed the meshes they tried to use to re-knit his bones. They ended up dressing the wound, treating the infection with an interspecies immuno-stimulant, and just letting him sleep.

"We saved the eye," Doctor Wijaya informed them, switching off her personal steri-shield. It hummed and pulsed, and shut down with a blue spark that snaked down her body like the shedding of a second skin. "He may still wish for a cosmetic or bionic enhancement for functionality. We can provide a consultation and waive the fee."

Amy looked at Rory expectantly, even as his hope evaporated as easily as switching off a steri-shield. "You don't think he'll recover full vision on his own?" he said numbly.

"Perhaps some perception of light and dark, as it is. There was significant damage to the retina and the macula from the impact." 

"Oh," said Amy. Rory just stared at the floor.

"Rory." He looked up to see Doctor Wijaya smiling sadly at him. "You could not have done better under the circumstances. That blow would have killed a human, you know. Your first aid saved his eye and and a lot of the muscles surrounding it as well." 

"Yeah, I know." Rory scrubbed a hand across his face. He knew he shouldn't feel guilty. He should feel relieved. Lucky, even. He didn't.

**

They stayed as guests of the Batu Murni Mining Company for three days. The Doctor was doped up and grumbling for most of the first day. Rory had to stop him trying to remove the synth-skin bandages every time the medical staff left the hospital room. 

"It itches," he complained. 

Rory sighed and poured another glass of water from the pitcher at the bedside.

"That just means it's working," he said, handing the Doctor the cup. 

The Doctor muttered something about medieval medicine, but he accepted the water, wrapping his fingers tightly around the cup and staring out the round observation portal in the room. Outside, the wide arc of Bahasa's surface turned serenely underneath a black expanse of sky.

On the second day, the Doctor sprung himself from medical observation by smiling disarmingly at all of the doctors and passing their tests with flying colors. Keep the bandages on for another week, they said. Contact the apothecary if more pain medication was needed. Within three hours, the Doctor was in the city web's central control strand, showing the Batu Murni board of directors how to disable Chethan walking tanks and gain back their losses at the front without causing either property damage or loss of life. Rory worked the projector as the Doctor pontificated. Afterward, Amy took the Doctor's hand on his blind side and he hardly even flinched.

Brilliant, the chairman enthused after the presentation. We'll organize a committee to get things underway. We should have a working plan in a month.

On the third day, they slipped quietly away from their quarters, cross-wired a civvie lifeboat into the dropship supply routes scheduled for Jakarta 3, and flew it the extra three thousand miles into Chethan disputed territory to land back at the TARDIS doors. 

The Doctor emphatically threw a lever on the console and sent them whirling away into the Vortex. He sat heavily on the jump seat and stared up at the Time Rotor, unblinking, for several minutes. The synth-skin stretched across the left half of his face glistened strangely in the green-orange glow, making his expression unreadable.

"Doctor--" Amy started, and he sprang up again.

"I'm fine. Get some rest," he told them, and disappeared into his ship's maze of corridors.

**

Rory slept for eight hours before going walkabout himself.

He thought he would find the Doctor in the med bay, or maybe the library, or his rarely-used bedroom. But it wasn't there that the TARDIS directed him. He had learned to recognize the slight psychic prod she used when she decided that the easiest way to reach her goal was rearranging the positions of people as opposed to rooms. So, Rory wandered the corridors until he found himself in the wardrobe room, watching the Doctor poke at his newly uncovered eye as he examined it in the mirror. 

Rory was on the Doctor's blind side so he coughed politely as he stepped forward into the room. The Doctor whirled and smiled and said, "Rory!", and seemed so absolutely genuinely glad to see him that it almost hurt. 

"Doctor," Rory said tentatively. The light was cavernous in the huge room, and he couldn't really make out any scars on the Doctor's face. His left eye may have seemed to squint slightly, but maybe that was Rory's imagination. Maybe.

The Doctor waved him in. "Here, have a look at the Company handiwork. Been admiring it myself, I admit."

The Doctor sat down on the staircase, under a brighter flood light than the mirror and the racks of clothes, and Rory sat beside him. He tried to keep a clinical eye in his examination, but his heart beat fast and his mouth felt dry. It wasn't just a clinical assessment; he knew that. For three days his mind had kept flashing back to that shell of a building on New Semarang, to the ragged mess of the Doctor's face and the dirt and grime that was ground in to the wound. All that blood. It was different from his short stint in A&E. Those accidents--he wasn't the only one in a thousand miles who could make the right decision. It wasn't the life and livelihood of his friend on the line. His training had kicked in and he'd done his best, but the past few nights he'd lain awake with _what if_ s churning through his thoughts. What if he couldn't have shut the tracer down? What if it had hit an inch to the right? What if he couldn't have held the Doctor's hands away--?

A hand entwined with his own, and he realized he'd closed his eyes. 

"Rory," the Doctor said quietly. "Rory, it's all right."

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry, I just need--" 

"I know," the Doctor said.

He needed to see it now. He needed to see it was okay. Rory swallowed and took a breath, and opened his eyes. 

It was still the Doctor in front of him, of course. The bruises had faded, and the only sign of the skin bonds were a series of hair-thin scars running from the bridge of his nose across his cheek. The skin was pink and a bit puffy, and there was even less hair on his left eyebrow than usual. 

"There we are," the Doctor encouraged him. He studied Rory's face with his right eye. His left looked smaller and off-centre, the part of the iris that was in view still startlingly green but staring stubbornly in at his nose. Some of that was muscle weakness, Rory knew. It might get a little better with time.

For a human, that level of healing after so short a time would warrant its own Bible verse. Rory took another deep breath. "How are the bones?" he asked. "Are you in any pain?"

"They're sore but healing properly," the Doctor answered. He sniffed and winced. "I'd rather not get a head cold anytime soon, but the discomfort should only last a few more days."

"And your eye. . . " Rory said.

The Doctor blinked, and sighed. "Nothing yet, but honestly, it's too early to tell. Anyway, I've got one good eye left, and I've always wondered if this ensemble could support an eyepatch; eyepatches are cool if you have the right hat . . ."

Rory snorted. "Don't you dare," he said. "Amy will kill you." 

The Doctor smiled at him. It was still jarring, seeing that spark of life--the hope, the boundless optimism--reaching only one side of his face. But in that moment, Rory realized it was cosmetic in all the ways that mattered. There might be challenges, even permanent changes, but they were changes that would never, ever touch who the Doctor really was. And in that moment, Rory realized that whatever happened, it was something they both could live with. His hand started trembling, and because he suddenly felt as though he had to do something with it, he scrubbed it stubbornly through his hair. 

"Perhaps not an eyepatch, then." The Doctor gave Rory a gentle smirk. He took Rory's hand again from where he was worrying his fringe, and his face softened. "Rory Williams," he said, looking down at their intertwined fingers. "I haven't thanked you properly. The deepest trance I could do wouldn't have salvaged anything if I'd . . ." He trailed off, and looked up. "Thank you. For saving my eye."

"Even if it's damaged beyond repair?" Rory asked. A tear fell onto his cheek and he swiped it away with his free hand. "If you won't ever see out of it again?"

The Doctor hugged Rory to his blind side, solid and strong as ever. 

"Even if it comes to that," he spoke into the room. "Even then." 

**

**Author's Note:**

> written at the behest of an anonymous prompter who wanted to see Rory using his mad nursing skills and caring for the Doctor in the face of a disfiguring injury. All the tropes, yes, I know. For some reason I want to write them all with Eleven.


End file.
